


Sweet, Spicy, Impossible

by Angel Ascending (angel_in_ink)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb Using Frumpkin As Best Therapy Cat Continues, F/M, Nightmares, Pining, Presumed One Sided Attraction, References to past trauma, Repressed Feelings, Spoilers Through Episode 77 Of Campaign 2, emotional hurt comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 07:21:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20653349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_in_ink/pseuds/Angel%20Ascending
Summary: Jester smiles at him, and for a moment he’s back in the market, one hand on his coin purse, looking at Jester’s broad grin as she bought him paper and ink for his spells. His heart is beating as hard as it had after his nightmare, but for an entirely different reason. He can feel the words he didn’t say then rising up in his throat, slow and thick, creeping towards his tongue. He imagines saying them, here in the quiet. He imagines what her lips would feel like under his. Would she taste sweet like molasses or spicy like cinnamon?





	Sweet, Spicy, Impossible

Caleb sighs as the words in the ancient spell book shift and blur, and he leans back to tiredly rub at his eyes. Either the book is playing tricks on him or he needs reading glasses. Both, maybe. There must be a place to purchase such things in Rosohna, surely. He will have to ask Essek about it, the next time they meet.

“Caaaaaay-leb!” Jester’s sing-song voice from above him echoes off the stone walls of his room. “You read way too much. You should come up here with me instead!”

Caleb looks up to see Jester peering down at him from the chair he had suspended for her earlier, twenty feet up in the air. She loves that trick so much, and Caleb had needed the practice. Her delighted laughter when he had levitated her up there hadn’t had anything to do with it. Of course not.

“I think it’s time you came down,” he calls up to her. Actually, he _knows _it’s time for her to come down. The spell only lasts so long, after all. In ten minutes that chair will come down whether he wants it to or not, and her with it.

“In a minute!” Jester calls back. “I’m almost finished with my drawing! Come see!”

Caleb heaves a sigh that is less exasperated and more fond than he cares to admit as he gets up from his chair and walks away from the table. It’s only the work of a few seconds to activate another spell of levitation, and then he is gently rising in the air, coming to rest next to Jester, who beams at him.

“The view is really great,” she tells him. “I can see your house from here!”

Caleb laughs at her joke and looks over his shoulder, playing along.

It’s midnight in Blumenthal and in the distance a house is burning, deadly bright against the darkness. He shouldn’t be able to hear the roar of flames as far away as he is, shouldn’t be able to feel the heat or hear the screams, shouldn’t be able to see himself, so young, so young, with his hands outstretched towards the blaze.

“I think I really captured the way the flames move,” Jester says, and Caleb’s gaze snaps to her smiling face, the way it seems lit by flickering light, before looking down at her sketchbook. Instead of his old house, she’s drawn _their_ house, right down to the tree growing from the top of it. Firelight dances in the windows as smoke pours from the cracks in the stone, ink and shadow moving on the page, bringing the images to horrible life.

“No,” Caleb whispers, but he can’t make himself look away, can’t make himself move. On the page, the windows of the house shatter from the heat, smoke and flame curling out of them.

“If you listen really closely you can hear us screaming,” Jester says matter of factly.

He can. Oh gods, he _can._ Yasha’s rage filled battle cry, Nott’s high pitched shriek, Beau’s cursing devolving into a scream while Fjord cries out in pain. Caduceus’s despairing moan is almost lost in the roar of the flames as the tree begins to burn, nearly drowned out by Jester’s wailing cries as she calls out to Caleb.

At the bottom of the picture Caleb himself stands, hands outstretched.

The sketchbook bursts into flame, and Caleb grabs for it, not caring if he gets burned, just wanting to get the cursed thing away from Jester, but instead he’s stopped by Jester reaching out and taking both of his hands.

“You know you can talk to me about anything, right Caleb?” Jester’s voice sounds cheerful when she asks him that, but her expression flickers with the flames on the page, one moment happy, the next moment anguished, tears rolling down her cheeks. “You’re a good friend,” she tells him as she begins to burn, and he can’t let her go, he can’t do anything, he can’t—

Caleb wakes with his hand pressing against his mouth so hard that he tastes blood from where his teeth have dug into his lower lip. He can’t scream. He can’t scream because that will wake up Master Ikithon, and then his teacher will know that he’s _weak_ and that he needs _correction_ and—

Memory returns to Caleb in between shallow breaths as he shivers from the chill of sweat cooling on his body, as he listens to the too fast skipping of his heart. He is in a bed at the Lavish Chateau, and the warm weight next to him is not Astrid or Wulf, but Fjord. The dim glow in one corner of the room has nothing to do with moonlight and everything to do with the fact that Caduceus is sleeping on the floor, the new fungus that seems to have taken up residence on his clothing and in his fur shedding a gentle blue light that reflects off of Caleb’s silver thread. Jester and Beau are sleeping in Jester’s room, surrounded by more of Caleb’s silver thread. Nott is sleeping with her family tonight. They are safe. He had a nightmare. That was all.

Caleb snaps his fingers very softly and Frumpkin appears in an instant, landing beside Caleb on the bed and immediately flopping down on the mattress, purring loudly. Caleb pries his hand away from his mouth and draws Frumpkin close, the other hand wrapping around his necklace. He is safe. His friends are safe. Jester is safe. He closes his eyes, willing his breathing to steady, his heart to slow. It is several hours until dawn, and he needs to sleep.

Five minutes and forty five seconds later, Caleb sighs and sits up in bed. Sleep isn’t coming for him, even though he’s tired. If he was back at the Xhorhaus, he’d be able to pace his study, a book in one hand and Frumpkin slung around his neck. Here though, his options are rather limited. Perhaps he can go downstairs, sit at the bar and continue studying his newest spells for a few hours before the kitchen staff wakes up and begins preparing for the day.

Beside him, Fjord sneezes and mumbles something, rolling over in his sleep. It’s that little action that decides Caleb, and it’s easy to find his books in the dim light cast by Caduceus’s fungus. He throws his coat on over his sleep clothes, because he’s not going anywhere without the spell components tucked into the coat’s many pockets, and with Frumpkin curled around his neck, he slips out of the room and down the many halls towards the stairs. He has the layout of the place memorized of course, has mentally noted where the creaky floorboards are, is extra quiet when he walks past the rooms that he knows belong to Jester and to her mother.

He’s halfway down the stairs when he hears a noise that’s not his footfalls, not his own quiet breathing or the purring of his familiar. Caleb freezes and Frumpkin stops purring immediately, head up and alert, tail lashing against Caleb’s shoulder. The sound is soft, muffled, almost familiar.

Caleb’s first thought is of the letter Nott and Jester had sent all those months ago, of Astrid, but even as he thinks that he mentally moves it down the list of possibility. Maybe the nameless Scourger had been right in that she knew Astrid better than he did now, but the Astrid he had known had never been one to deal death from the shadows. It was more likely to be a run of the mill thief, or perhaps another patron who had been unable to sleep, same as him, or one of the servants on some bit of business. Still.

_Go see_, Caleb mentally tells Frumpkin, and reaches for the banister as he puts his senses into his cat. He watches through Frumpkin’s eyes as the familiar jumps from his shoulder and pads quickly and quietly down the stairs and into the bar area. The room is only lit by faint moonlight, so whoever is sitting at a table tucked away in a corner only registers as a shadow in Frumpkin’s sight, but sight is not the only sense Frumpkin has. The cat moves closer, and now Caleb recognizes the muffled sound of crying, just as Frumpkin’s thoughts, just faintly perceptible to Caleb, register the smells of _sugarinkfrost _that Frumpkin thinks of as belonging to Jester.

Caleb feels his heart lurch in his chest as he realizes that he’s been holding his breath since the moment he had frozen on the stair. He takes a quiet, shaky breath and then another. He should go back to his room, give her some privacy, like he would want if he was crying. He should go downstairs, ask her what is wrong, like she would do for him if their situations were reversed. He remains on the stair, frozen between two choices, even as Frumpkin leaps up onto the table, unbidden. He is Caleb’s familiar, but that does not mean he is a mindless creature. Through his eyes, Caleb sees Jester, her face buried in her arms, and her muffled sobs ache and echo inside of him like a second heartbeat.

Caleb doesn’t consciously tell Frumpkin to try and comfort Jester, but perhaps his familiar picks up on his emotions, or maybe Frumpkin himself just hates seeing Jester sad as much as he does. The cat purrs, rubbing his furry cheek against Jester’s arm, continuing to do so even when she raises her head and blinks at him, her eyes red from crying.

“Frumpkin?” Jester whispers. “What are you doing down here?”

Frumpkin just purrs louder and looks up at her, patting her tear stained face with one gentle paw, mirroring Caleb’s desire to wipe Jester’s tears away.

Jester does a sniffly sort of laugh and reaches up to scratch Frumpkin behind his ears. “Awww, you don’t want me to be sad. That’s okay, I don’t want me to be sad either.” She keeps petting Frumpkin with one hand as she wipes at her face with the sleeve of her pink nightdress. “But it happens anyway, you know? Or maybe you don’t know, maybe it’s different for magic cats.” She sighs. “Is it nice being a cat?”

Frumpkin goes _mrrrp_ and leans into her hand. Caleb sees Jester almost smile, her teeth bright in the dark, then she frowns and cocks her head, looking into Frumpkin’s eyes. Caleb, through Frumpkin, holds her gaze for a long moment before making Frumpkin look away.

“Caleb isn’t doing the listening thing right now, is he?” There’s a moment’s pause. “No, he’s probably asleep, just like everyone else.”

Caleb feels himself flush hot and cold all at once, guilt twisting in his stomach. He should go. He should leave Frumpkin down here to comfort Jester and just go. Is it his own selfishness that keeps him listening, his desire to know Jester better, his foolish crush that keeps him on the stairs, listening to what he shouldn’t?

“I don’t want him to know I’m sad,” Jester says softly. “I mean, I don’t want anyone to know, but _especially_ not Caleb. He’s already sad a lot, and I don’t want me being sad to make him _more _sad. He deserves to be happy! Everyone does! You and Momma and Caleb and Nott and Beau and Fjord and Caduceus and —-“ Jester’s voice falters, and a few fresh tears well up and slide down her cheeks. “And Yasha.” Jester wipes at her face with her sleeve again. “She was so sad _before_ and now it’s even worse, because that demon guy is making her _kill_ people and she doesn’t _want_ to, Frumpkin, I know she doesn’t! She was crying and I could see everything but I couldn’t _do _anything and it’s like— like when we were captured. I couldn’t do anything then either.”

Caleb watches as Jester draws Frumpkin close, hugging the cat to her chest. “We’re going to save her, I know we are, but it’s just—“ She buries her face in Frumpkin’s fur, and for a few long moments all Caleb can hear is Jester’s muffled breathing before she emerges once more. “Everything’s changing. _I’m_ changing. And not all the changes are bad! Some of them are really good! It’s just— harder than I thought it would be.”

Caleb tells Frumpkin to bat at Jester’s hair and the cat obeys, causing Jester to laugh, It’s a small sound of happiness, a tiny victory, but Caleb will take what he can get.

“Maybe I should try being a cat sometime. We could hang out in sunbeams and take naps and drink milk together— the milk thing sounds pretty good actually. You like milk, right Frumpkin? Caleb says you do.” Jester rubs the last of the tears from her eyes and gives the cat a small smile. “Some warm milk to help us sleep?”

Caleb remembers most things, some things more strongly than others, like the memory that comes to him now. His mother, her long red hair threaded through with strands of silver, stirring a pot of milk over the fire while he sat nearby, wrapped in the quilt from his bed. Frumpkin, the first Frumpkin, mortal and female, sitting in his lap, purring hard as if the sound could drown out the terror of his nightmares. He remembers the way the firelight had glinted off the spoonful of molasses his mother had stirred into his milk, the warmth of her gentle smile. The gingery-smooth sweetness of the milk, falling asleep by the fire to the sound of his mother’s soft lullabies—

“Frumpkin? Did you hear something?” Jester’s voice pulls Caleb out of his memory. “Hello? Is someone there?”

Caleb wipes away the wetness from his cheeks, cursing silently. He must have made some sort of sound, and Jester is second to Caduceus in her perception of small details. He summons a small, dancing light and makes his way down the stairs. “Jester? Is that you?”

“Caleb!” Jester’s whisper seems to be full of genuine happiness laced with concern. “You’re awake too?”

Caleb nods and walks over to where Jester is sitting. Frumpkin leaps up onto his shoulders when he comes close enough to do so, and Caleb reaches up to pet him. “There you are. Were you keeping Jester company while I was sleeping?”

“He was!” She reaches over and scratches Frumpkin right between his eyes. “He’s a very good listener.”

“Ja, he is,” Caleb agrees. He thinks about adding that his cat is good at keeping secrets as well, but that would tip Jester off that he had been listening, surely. “Did I hear you say something about warm milk?”

“You did! Would you like some?”

Caleb’s lips twitch up into a smile. “Only if I can help.”

Jester moves around the kitchen as easily as Caleb moves around his study and he remembers, suddenly, a conversation with Jester about skills she possessed. In between the innuendo had been the revelation that she was good at making scones. Her time here had not been spent entirely in her bedroom after all.

“Pots are in the cabinet,” Jester says, pointing with her tail as she reaches for two mugs. “Oh and I suppose we should light the stove.”

Caleb smiles as he finds a pot and places it on the counter. “There’s no need for that,” he tells her. “I have—uh— learned a new trick.”

“_More_ new magic?” Jester’s tail whips excitedly through the air as she turns back to Caleb. “Show me?”

“In a moment.” Caleb pours a bottle of milk into the pot and then hands the pot to Jester. Her eyes are bright and curious as she regards him, and the only sign that she had been crying before was a slight redness around the deep violet of her irises. He feels his face growing warm at her direct gaze, so he looks away and makes a show of finding his bottle of molasses and putting it on the counter as well. In a moment he won’t have his hands free. “I have practiced this a few times but— you might want to step back just in case. Please. About fifteen feet.” There were scorch marks in his new study at the Xhorhaus that were a testament to the first few times he had worked on the spell and though he’s confident that he’s mastered the cantrip, well, fire is something he refuses to take a chance with.

Jester moves back quickly, and when Caleb judges she is a safe distance away, only then does he spread out his hands, palms down and thumbs touching for an instant before he turns them over and up with a flourish, hands now cupped as he says a word that rolls off his tongue like smoke trailing from a campfire.

Fire blooms from his hands like a flower, glowing brightly in the near dark of the kitchen, settling in the confines of his cupped palms.

“You can come close again,” Caleb says, relief and pride mixed into his words. “If you hold the pot over my hands for a minute or two—“

“Caleb, that’s amazing!” Jester says with a grin as she holds the pot in place. “It almost looked like that spell Reani did back in the mountains to warm us up in the morning. Are you a secret druid now or something?”

Caleb chuckles. “Ah, no. To be honest, I’ve been trying for some time now to make a fire spell that would be more useful and less—destructive. Something I could light campfires with without—“

_Two houses in flames, two clouds of smoke, two sets of screams, one real, one only a nightmare._

“Caleb?” Jester’s voice is gentle. “Your hands are shaking. Are you all right?”

Caleb swallows hard, willing his hands to stop trembling. “Sorry, I— was just remembering a bad dream I had.” It’s not entirely a lie.

“So that’s why you were awake.” Jester shifts her grip on the pot. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Caleb shakes his head slightly. “It’s all right. It was something that was—frightening at the time, but now that I’m awake I realize it’s something that would never happen, something impossible and foolish, so it’s nothing to be scared of.” Another almost truth. What about you?”

“Me?” Jester’s smile flickers in the firelight, too much like Caleb’s nightmare for comfort. “What about me?”

“Why were you awake?” He doesn’t know, it wasn’t something she had told Frumpkin, but he can guess it has something to do with all the things that are weighing heavily on her mind.

“Oh, you know,” Jester’s voice is overly bright and her tail is completely still, two tells that she is lying for anyone who knows her well. “Beau snores really loudly sometimes and makes it hard to sleep.”

“That is true,” Caleb says, as if they haven’t all learned to sleep through Beau and Caduceus’s snoring by now. “You know, Jester, Frumpkin isn’t the only one around here that is good at listening. I—“

The milk chooses that time to go from a simmer to a furious, rolling boil. Caleb wills the flame out with a frantic thought as Jester jerks the pot back before the milk boils over. Perhaps it is just as well that his sentiment gets lost in the momentary chaos. There is so much he can’t tell her, why would she confide in him?

“I think it’ll still be okay,” Jester says as she carefully pours the milk into mugs, tipping the leftovers into a saucer for Frumpkin. “It was only boiling for a second or two.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Caleb assures her, picking up both mugs to bring them over to their table. “Can you grab that jar of molasses for me? And a spoon?”

“Is it for the milk?” Jester asks. “I’ve only ever seen you use molasses for spells.”

“It is mostly for spells, but I can spare some for this.”

“Momma always had cinnamon put in my milk when I couldn’t sleep,” Jester says, and Caleb hears the sudden excited swishing of her tail as it thumps against the floor. “We could do both! I bet it’d taste really good!”

The two of them sit, Frumpkin drinking plain milk out of his saucer when Caleb directs him to, and the next few moments are spent stirring molasses and cinnamon into the hot milk. For Caleb the taste is both familiar and not, spicy-sweet, a little bit sharp. It’s possible he had gotten distracted and put in a little too much cinnamon.

“This is really good,” Jester says, and her tone is not the overly bright one she had used earlier when she had been trying to cover up her sadness. It’s quieter than that. Thoughtful. “I’m sorry you had a nightmare, but I’m glad you came down here.”

“Me too,” Caleb says softly.

Jester smiles at him, and for a moment he’s back in the market, one hand on his coin purse, looking at Jester’s broad grin as she bought him paper and ink for his spells. His heart is beating as hard as it had after his nightmare, but for an entirely different reason. He can feel the words he didn’t say then rising up in his throat, slow and thick, creeping towards his tongue. He imagines saying them, here in the quiet. He imagines what her lips would feel like under his. Would she taste sweet like molasses or spicy like cinnamon?

“Caleb?” Jester is still smiling at him. “What are you thinking about?”

Reality and doubt come crashing back as Caleb reaches for his mug and takes another sip, washing away the words he had wanted to say. He forces himself to smile. “Just something that will never happen,” he says with a chuckle. “Something impossible and foolish.”

**Author's Note:**

> So during/after Episode 77, a screenshot made its way around Tumblr with a screenshot of the D&D Beyond overlay that listed Caleb as having a secondary attack that was listed as "Caleb's Produce Flame," a probable reskinning of the Druid cantrip Produce Flame. Cue me sitting here trying to figure out which spell Caleb would tinker with to produce the same result, complete with hand gestures. Burning Hands seemed to be the way to go.
> 
> My multi-shipper heart was very full last episode, let me tell you. I also have another nightmare ready to go that's more... Essek-centric. Poor Caleb and his bad dreams.
> 
> I'm angel-ascending on Tumblr and angel_in_ink on Twitter if y'all want to stop by and say hi!


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